If you listen carefully, you just might hear the sounds of the past as you stand on the 7400 block of Brush St., along Detroit’s North End. You can certainly see the shadows and outlines where, just blocks away, one-time automotive factories now stand idle and decaying, as well as the former headquarters of General Motors.
Like much of Detroit’s inner city, the North End has fallen on hard times in recent decades. Where tidy workers’ homes once stood shoulder-to-shoulder, there are now more gaps than in the smile of a veteran hockey player.
In fact, almost every building is gone on this particular block – but that’s the good news, the site being transformed into the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative, a three-acre micro-agricultural project where as many as 200 different types of produce are being grown. It’s an ironic return, quite literally, to the city’s roots as this land was once part of the many farms established by Detroit’s original French settlers.
Known as MUFI to its supporters and many volunteers, it’s one of several similar projects in the Motor City. Organizers have a number of different goals in mind. They’re providing food at no charge to the more needy in the immediate community. They’re giving volunteers, both from the neighborhoods and suburbs, a chance to till the soil and hone their work ethic.
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They’re also attempting to rebuild a once-vibrant community, buoyed by the nascent revival of Detroit’s downtown and Midtown districts, only a few miles away.
“A lot of people in the area were disillusioned. They didn’t share the enthusiasm” about the city’s revival” until it began to touch them, said Tyson Gersh, the founder and president of the farming coop, as he prepared to lead visitors through the long-abandoned three-story apartment building that will soon become the group’s headquarters and provide space for a new farm-to-table restaurant.
Once slated for demolition, the building has been salvaged with the help of volunteers and a growing list of corporate sponsors, including General Motors.
“We wanted to use this opportunity to get involved as high up in the food chain – quite literally – as we could,” said Candice Messing, the GM project manager overseeing the billion-dollar renovation of the automaker’s mile-square Technical Center in the Detroit suburb of Warren.
In years past, the Technical Center project would have meant dumping perhaps 100 tons of old office furniture and other waste into landfills. Instead, GM is partnering with office equipment giant Herman Miller to repurpose as much of that old gear as possible. MUFI is one of about 100 community organizations in Detroit that will share in the spoils.
“We’re coming full circle,” added Messing, suggesting that MUFI is returning some of Detroit’s land to the use it had for hundreds of years before the old and now abandoned plants surrounding the farm transformed the city early in the 20th Century.
But simply plowing under old homes and factories isn’t an end-all-be-all, stressed MUFI founder Gersh. It’s just part of a broader effort to make a long down-and-out city more attractive to new investment while also improving the lives of those who stayed behind during the years when Motown was crumbling.
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A walk around the perimeter of the farm reveals that at least a dozen neighboring buildings have been rehabilitated since MUFI first broke ground. Some have been saved by locals who’ve been given access to low-interest loans and other incentives. But there are also a number of one-time suburbanites drawn back to a city showing new signs of life.
“A younger workforce is, increasingly, looking for purpose in their lives,” said Geoff Trotter, chief development office for Sustainable Brands, a non-profit group from San Francisco that helps pair up community programs with corporations like General Motors and BASF, the chemical giant that is also helping fund MUFI. Many companies recognize that their employees feel more committed to firms that embrace community activism, Trotter explained, as he eyed the urban farm.
Sustainable Brands has been running a series of conferences in San Diego bringing together community groups and corporations. In May, it will stage its first Midwest event – and the Detroit gathering will be its biggest yet. While California may have a tradition of liberal activism, Trotter said, cities in the Rust Belt are starting to recognize their own opportunities, and the Motor City is a prime example.
For decades, the mindset seemed to be that cities like Detroit were disposable. Projects like MUFI may only cover a few acres at a time, said Trotter, “but it demonstrates there’s an alternate way forward.”
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